Category: Uncategorized

A prominent Newark clergyman raised the spectre of disorder in the city’s streets unless Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo acts quickly to restore the academic independence of Essex County College , plug a budget shortfall at the school, and help the two-year college remain open and fully accredited.(more…)

I don’t intend to describe the National Museum of African American History and Culture here, or even to try to describe my reaction to it. I will simply post the pictures I took. I only took a few. The choices of those pictures represent my reaction.(more…)

Caliburn and its designers Manish Parashar and Ivan Rodero from a RU photo used by The Star-Ledger.

New Jersey’s largest supercomputer–considered one of the largest computing systems in the world–was quietly shut down a month ago by Rutgers University just weeks after a much ballyhooed celebration of what was then called “the most powerful system in the state” that would be made available to government, private industry, higher education, and other organizations.(more…)

Lawyers for Newark’s public school children have asked New Jersey’s appellate courts to block the Christie Administration’s effort to nearly double charter school enrollment in the state’s largest school district, warning the increased privatization of the city’s schools would deepen the system’s fiscal crisis, increase racial isolation, and deprive the neediest public school students of essential services.(more…)

A few days after the United States Senate confirmed the appointment of an avowed enemy of public education–Betsy DeVos–to be the nation’s education secretary, advocates of public education held a conference in New Brunswick to search for some reason for hope. The meeting’s organizers, including members and staff of such pro-public education groups as the Education Law Center and Save Our Schools, depicted the election later this year of a new governor to replace Chris Christie as an opportunity–as, indeed, it is.(more…)

New Jersey’s highest court has turned back an effort by Gov. Chris Christie and his team of compliant and spineless lawyers to convert the judicial tribunal into an unelected mini-Legislature willing to scrap both equitable school funding and protections for school employees.(more…)

Angered by President Donald Trump’s sudden and unprecedented attack on refugees and immigrants, nearly 1,000 protesters from throughout New Jersey demonstrated in the wind-driven cold for hours Sunday outside a privately-operated, for profit prison in Elizabeth.(more…)

A few days ago, the chief editorial writer and columnist for New Jersey’s largest newspaper wrote he leapt to his feet to applaud Gov. Chris Christie’s recent State of the State address. The journalist wrote he was “standing up and cheering” the politician who persists in trying to punish an independent press by depriving it of revenue from legal ads. He was cheering a man who, until Nov. 8 and the election of Donald Trump, represented the worst in modern American electoral politics.(more…)

Editor’s Note: In the spring of 2016, James Fallows, the senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, began what he called a series of “time capsules” that could, in the future, provide a key as to what Americans were thinking during the election campaign–as Trump began his march to the presidency. He finished with 152 of the “time capsules” just before the vote. This site will publish one of the capsules every week or so and that should bring us to the doorstep of the 2020 election.(more…)